Living: Nottinghams glass tower

When a builder used to restoring Victorian houses decided to go modern in a conservation area, he was asking for trouble, reports Heather Dixon

Bill Hammond has spent much of his professional life restoring Victorian houses in Nottingham. But when it came to building his own home in the city’s most stringent conservation area, he wanted to create something radical — a seven-storey structure of glass and steel on a former school playground.

Hammond, a property developer, had transformed the two Victorian schools on either side into modern apartment blocks and was left with an awkward 374sq m plot in between.

“I decided to build a house for myself,” he says. “I liked the idea of creating something very modern in a conservation area and making it work with, rather than against, the neighbouring properties.”

Buying the land from his own company, Watermeadows, Hammond teamed up with the Nottingham-based architects Julian Marsh and Jerzy Grochowski and began the “tortuous” process of creating a design that met the approval of local planners, conservationists and neighbours in